A look into MSU’s 2025 American Marketing Association Regional Conference

The American Marketing Association (AMA) at MSU hosted its annual Regional Conference from Feb. 27 to March 1 in the Strand Union Building and the Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship. The conference included 12 scheduled events as well as workshops, competitions, sports marketing and outdoor industry panels and two guest speakers. 

The AMA describes itself as the “essential community for marketers,” according to its website. The organization publishes five academic journals, has a philanthropic foundation, offers credentialed learning courses and provides collegiate chapters with resources. The AMA currently has 29,000 members worldwide and more than 320 active college chapters. 

MSU’s chapter began in 2016, according to MSU marketing professor and AMA faculty advisor Eric Van Steenburg. “This chapter was built on three pillars: professionalism, networking and professional development,” he said. 

According to the MSU AMA website, the Regional Conference allows students to get more involved with the AMA and offers opportunities to learn from leaders in the business field. Per AMA collegiate standards, college chapters nationwide host similar conferences on their campuses annually. 

“We’ve been planning this conference since day one of the school year. I think there was even stuff going into it the summer beforehand,” MSU AMA chapter President Aleisha Dutton said. This year’s conference — officially titled the “Foundant Regional AMA Conference" — was presented by Reveal Technologies, a Bozeman-based defense company that produces software, according to its website.  

The conference was primarily organized by MSU’s AMA conference committee, which is a smaller cohort of executive board members. The committee is overseen by Amber Kurth, the MSU AMA vice president of programs and led by Leah Gringas, the director of conference management. 

Kurth said the conference has its organizational format set by the AMA. According to her, part of organizing the conference included planning relevant events. “That's where the outdoor industry and sports marketing events come from because there is heavy interest in AMA at MSU for those two things,” Kurth said. 

The conference had speakers and panelists scheduled throughout Thursday and Friday, including keynote speaker and AMA CEO Bennie Johnson and Florida International University marketing professor Joshua Dorsey. 

Dorsey’s speech on Thursday covered cannabis marketing, which was specifically geared toward engaging students, according to Dutton. “We’re trying to keep up with the trends,” she said.

The second day of the conference included Johnson’s keynote speech and a sports marketing panel that featured speakers such as Bobcat football alum and current Chicago Bears defensive end Daniel Hardy, Dorsey, MSU alumna Madeline Ouellette and others. The panel’s conversations ranged from personal branding to the future of name, image and likeness deals.

“We know that students around here really like panels because in a panel discussion, you can have people from multiple aspects of a certain industry and get different perspectives,” Van Steenburg said. 

According to Dutton, securing speakers like Johnson and Dorsey has helped the conference grow. “All these things have helped make this conference bigger and better than we’ve ever done before,” Dutton said. “The conference is continuing to grow; it’s larger than last year,” Gringas said.

For the first time, the University of Montana and California State University Chico sent students from their respective AMA chapters to MSU’s conference, according to Van Steenburg. 

“[MSU] is definitely on the map when it comes to the AMA collegiate. And I couldn’t be more proud of the total effort that everybody has put in to make this thing happen,” he said.

Steenberg explained that the AMA ranks its college chapters annually based on achievement and community impact. “We’ve been named a Top 10 chapter each of the last five years,” said Van Steenburg.

The MSU AMA meetings are held every other Wednesday from 5 to 6 p.m. in Jabs Hall. “It doesn’t matter what your major is,” Van Steenburg said. “Coming to any single AMA event will allow you to meet people and figure out how [the] AMA can help you grow.”

To learn more about the MSU AMA, go to https://www.amamontanastate.org.